Rosewill RX81-MP External USB/eSATA 3.5 Review

Introduction:

With the amount of data being moved in and out of computers you can never have enough storage space. So you just upgraded to the latest terabyte hard drive and don't know what to do with the old one? One perfect solution is to turn it into an external drive. With an external drive you can now have a place to back up important files or even transfer files from computer to computer. With the high capacity drives these days, external drives are becoming more and more popular to hold movies, photos, or even the ever important business data. Sure you can go out and spend the money on a pre-assembled external drive, but in many cases these units cost more than making your own, and besides being the enthusiast that I am, I like to build my own versus buying it pre-made.

Rosewill has one of these types of external enclosures for a 3.5 inch drive with USB 2.0 and eSATA connections. The Rosewill RX81-MP Enclosure allows you to take any 3.5 inch SATA drive and turn it into a portable storage medium for anything your heart desires to put on it. You can even have a separate operating system on it as long as your PC supports booting from external devices. Today I am going to assemble my own external drive using the Rosewill RX81-MP enclosure and put it through some tests to see how well it works.

Closer Look:

The RX81-MP Enclosure comes packaged in a very sturdy box to protect the contents. The front of the box shows the two versions of the enclosure as well as some of the features. The back informs you of the specs, the features of the RX81-MP and the system requirements needed to make the enclosure work properly. Included with the RX81-MP is the enclosure itself, the power brick and extension cable, a USB 2.0 cable, an eSATA cable, and some misc screws.

The RX81-MP is made of aluminum and metal to help dissipate the heat created by the hardrive. Essentially it acts like one big heatsink. The front is ported with holes to allow air to flow into the enclosure and cool the drive passively. The back has an on-off switch, a USB 2.0 port, an eSATA port, and the power port.

Now that you have seen what the RX81-MP is, lets install a drive in it so we can test it out.